Launchpad: G.ho.st, Realius, Cleverset and more
Here are the companies that are giving pitches at today’s Launchpad event at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco: Ghost, Realius, Cleverset, Ghost, Click Forensics, TripIt and Spiceworks.
The first three are new to VentureBeat. We’ll update this post as we learn more about them. For now, here’s a summary:
G.ho.st — The company says it provides every person with a free virtual computer (VC) available from any browser, offering 3GB of online storage, email, and your favorite Web-based software.
Cleverset — This is a strange one for lauchpad, because Cleverset is five years old. But the Seattle company recently turned to develop personalized recommendation technology to consumers who are shopping on retail sites. It is a competitor to Aggregate Knowledge of Silicon Valley, and others. Cleverset records information about products in order to draw relations between them. The method goes beyond existing recommendation services that might, for instance, suggest different kinds of umbrellas if you’re looking to buy one. Instead, CleverSet might also suggest a wide-brimmed hat and a box of chamomile tea. All of the products it knows about can be mapped out and cross-referenced for interesting buyers.
Previously, it offered data-mining technology has been used by the U.S. military to track battlefield assets in Iraq. The National Institutes of Health to determine the likelihood that an elderly individual will stumble and fall. John Cook profiled CleverSet two years ago. Google’s VP of research, Peter Norvig and former Amazon.com chief scientist Andreas Weigend have been advisors.
Ghost — TK.
Spiceworks — The company relies on ads to offer IT management software. We’ve covered it in August. It has plenty of competition, including Packettrap, announced yesterday, though none that we know want to rely entirely on ads. It got $8 million from Shasta and Austin, which is a bit of a coincidence considering that Click Forensics (see next entry) got funding from the same two venture firms. Other competitors are GroundWork OpenSource (see our coverage), Ipswitch, Kace Networks and SolarWinds.net.
Click Forensics — The San Antonio, Texas company reports on online click-fraud, has raised $5 million in a first round of financing earlier this year. See our coverage. It is backed by Austin Ventures and Shasta Ventures, and competes against companies like FraudWall, and ClickFacts (see coverage). Click-fraud is when someone clicks on an online page or advertisement purposefully to inflate revenue for the publisher of the site hosting the advertisement, or to make the advertiser pay more than they otherwise would have. Click Forensics is a spin out of Optimal iQ,
TripIt– This is a travel plan organizer that we covered at the Techcrunch conference.
Source: VentureBeat